tlambert | December 18, 2004 Stuart Benjamin writes:
[John Lott's] core thesis, though, was called into doubt by a number of researchers, most prominently in a study (and reply, both complete with data sets) written by Ian Ayres and John Donohue, two top empirical economists. They concluded that the data did not support Lott's assertions regarding right-to-carry laws and crime. Lott helped to write and then withdrew his name from a response to Ayres and Donohue. He responded in other venues to them, but did not respond to some of their key assertions.
Perhaps he was waiting/hoping for vindication from the closest…
tlambert | December 17, 2004The National Academy of Sciences panel on firearms and violence has reported its findings. The press release says:
There is no credible evidence that "right-to-carry" laws, which allow qualified adults to carry concealed handguns, either decrease or increase violent crime. To date, 34 states have enacted these laws.
There is almost no evidence that violence-prevention programs intended to steer children away from guns have had any effects on their behavior, knowledge, or attitudes regarding firearms. More than 80 such programs exist.
Research has found associations between gun…
tlambert | December 15, 2004Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin's on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively:
A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth's recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.
So let's get a little more scientific about this issue.
As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth's mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth's mass cooler than 100…
tlambert | December 15, 2004Nominations have opened for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards. I don't you should take awards like these too seriously, but they are a good way for folks to let others know about interesting blogs.
tlambert | December 14, 2004 The biggest limitation of the Lancet study is the small sample size. We can be reasonably confident that deaths have increased in Iraq since the invasion, but the 100,000 estimate is a very rough one. The sample from Falluja found an alarming number of deaths from air strikes, but since it was only one sample it is hard to guess how many others have died in similar ways. Fortunately, it is easy to address both these limitations. For the cost of running the Iraq war for about two minutes it would be possible to do a survey with four times the…
tlambert | December 12, 2004 The London Daily Telegraph has been running a cynical and dishonest campaign in the UK to give people the right to defend themselves against burglars. It's dishonest because, as I have detailed here and here, people in the UK already have the right to defend themselves against burglars or anyone else who threatens them. The Daily Telegraph's campaign is nothing more than a beat up to create an issue to attack the government with. The truly disgraceful thing about their scare campaign is that it could convince people that self-defence is unlawful and frighten them…
tlambert | December 10, 2004 Excellent news. Some climate scientists have started a blog called RealClimate, something sorely needed to correct the disinformation put about by Tech Central Station and the like. I hope they can do for climate science what The Panda's Thumb does for evolution.
One of the first posts is by Rasmus Benestad on the McKitrick-Michaels paper that got degrees and radians mixed up. Years ago, when McKitrick was first working on the paper Robert Grumbine observed that McKitrick had
Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but…
tlambert | December 10, 2004 This post is a way for me to keep track of which blogs have blogrolled me. If you have a blog and have had the good taste to blogroll me, you can add your blog here.
[Go here to see the table and the form.](http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/survey/backlink.html)
tlambert | December 8, 2004 Mike Harwood asked Les Roberts about the breakdown of the violent deaths. Roberts' reply:
Yes, all 12 non-coalition violent deaths happened outside of Falluja. (1 Kut, 1 Thiqar, 1 Karbala, 7 Baghdad, 1 Diala, 1 Missan, Note Baghdad is about 3-7 times greater in population than these other Governorates so the rates are not so different)
Bombing deaths:
Thiqar
M5, M2, F22 (one family)
Thiqar (different village)
M27
Missan
1mo. & 6mo. in same households (often there are multiple sons with wives under the same roof --- interviewer did not record the gender of the…
tlambert | December 7, 2004 In an email to a poster at The High Road forum Lott writes
"The actual data has been available on one of my websites at www.johnlott.org since February 2003. The Appendix of my book, The Bias Against Guns, goes through and discusses the data in depth. I talk about how the survey was done, the questions used in the survey, who did the survey, how it was weighted, etc. there. The www.johnlott.org website also has some downloads discussing the survey debate in general.
On this last point, Lambert has been extremely dishonest. For example, he has a long list of surveys but he lists the date…
tlambert | December 3, 2004 Daniel Davies takes apart another bogus critique of the Lancet study, this one from the British Foreign Office that relies on comparing apples to oranges. Michael Lewis at Iraq Analysis has a more detailed rebuttal.
Remarkably, Tech Central Station has published an article by Iain Murray, who acknowledges that
The study itself is actually much more statistically sound than many commentators (including some in these pages) have suggested, and it certainly suggests that the mortality rate is worse in the unstable insurgency-ridden Iraq after the ouster of…
tlambert | December 2, 2004 Medact, a UK health charity has a new study on the effects of the war on health and the health system in Iraq. Some extracts:
A recent scientific study has suggested that upwards of 100,000 Iraqis may have died since the 2003 coalition invasion, mostly from violence, mainly air strikes by coalition forces. Most of those reportedly killed by coalition forces were women and children. Many thousands of conflict-related injuries were also sustained. Infant mortality has risen because of lack of access to skilled help in childbirth, as well as because of…
tlambert | December 1, 2004 Just when you thought you had seen all the different possible attacks on the Lancet study, Helle Dale, writing in the Washington Times, comes up with a new one: the study's authors are having second thoughts. Dale writes
As the Financial Times reported on Nov. 19, even the Lancet study's authors are now having second thoughts. Iraq's Health Ministry estimates by comparison that all told, 3,853 Iraqis have been killed and 155,167 wounded.
Gee, did the Financial Times really report that the authors were having second thoughts? Let's check. The report (…
tlambert | November 30, 2004 Yes, he's back! Over at his website Fumento has posted Hate Mail, Volume 32, which contains his creatively edited version of our exchange. According to Fumento, it went like this:
Fumento:
And no, the Lancet column I wrote didn't just appear in the four papers you mentioned. It appears in places you don't even know about because, unlike your blog, it isn't confined to the web but also appears in print. Yesterday it was in the Washington Times print edition. But if only the web interests you, you should know it was picked up by the entire McClatchy News Service. That means that…
tlambert | November 28, 2004 The Lavoisier group is an Australian astroturf operation. John Quiggin observed that:
This body is devoted to the proposition that basic principles of physics, discovered by among others, the famous French scientist Antoine Lavoisier, cease to apply when they come into conflict with the interests of the Australian coal industry.
Melissa Fyfe has an interesting profile in The Age on the Lavoisier group. Some extracts:
At 401 Collins Street on Monday night, 50 men gathered in a room of plush green carpet, pottery and antique lights to launch a book about the science…
tlambert | November 27, 2004 The latest pundit to attack the Lancet study is somebody called John Lott. He writes:
I haven't spent a lot of time going through the methodology used in this survey by Lancet, but I don't know how one could assume that those surveyed couldn't have lied to create a false impression. After all, some do have a strong political motive.
Well, unlike surveys of defensive guns use, where the people questioned can make anything up that they liked, the researchers tried to verify the deaths with death certificates and were successful in 81% of the…
tlambert | November 26, 2004 I haven't commented on Kaplan's shoddy critique of the Lancet because Daniel Davies already demolished it here. Kaplan did have one argument that Davies did not address, so I will deal with that in this post. Kaplan wrote:
The survey team simply could not visit some of the randomly chosen clusters; the roads were blocked off, in some cases by coalition checkpoints. So the team picked other, more accessible areas that had received similar amounts of damage. But it's unclear how they made this calculation. In any case, the detour destroyed the survey's…
tlambert | November 25, 2004David Adesnik has replied to my post on malnutrition in Iraq. He has conceded that the Washington Post was reporting the results of a new survey rather than the results of one from 2003. But he is still arguing that the war did not cause the increase in malnutrition seen in the 2003 study:
The question isn't whether a certain child had some diarrhoea during the invasion, but whether that child started to have diarrhoea (or whether the condition intensified) during that five week period.
If we look at this UNICEF press release (which Adesnik…
tlambert | November 25, 2004 One of the arguments made against the Lancet study was that the study had greatly underestimated the pre-war mortality rate, because the study found that it was about 29 per 1000 live births, while UNICEF estimated that it was 108. Now the 108 dates from 1999, but sceptics doubted that it could have declined dramatically by 2002. However, other studies (see table below) show that the incidence of acute malnutrition declined dramatically between the late 90s and 2002, so it seems likely that infant mortality would have done so as well…
tlambert | November 22, 2004 Chris Bertram points out that a new study suggests that the Lancet's finding of an increase in infant mortality following the invasion of Iraq is correct. The Washington Post reports:
After the rate of acute malnutrition among children younger than 5 steadily declined to 4 percent two years ago, it shot up to 7.7 percent this year, according to a study conducted by Iraq's Health Ministry in cooperation with Norway's Institute for Applied International Studies and the U.N. Development Program....
International aid efforts and the U.N. oil-for-food…